Nexus One: Holiday Memory Game

As if having their very own Nexus One wasn’t enough, Google gave a bunch of lucky employees with the device one more reason to feel extra special. If they visit the Android website from their Nexus one they get to play a little holiday memory matching card game that only they can play.

When they first visit the site they get a welcome screen with rules (see left) that reads:

Welcome to Nexus One!

For some festive fun, we’ve put a new twist on a classic game: “Memory”

Click on “Start Game” and you will have 5 seconds to memorize the placement of 12 pairs of cards. After 5 seconds, the cards will be flipped face down.

Your goal is to find all 12 matching pairs as quickly as possible

Just tap on a card to flip it over

Continue flipping cards until all matches are found

Start Game

If you actually start the game here is a little glimpse of how it looks:

This is cute but odd as all heck – I have no clue why they would go through the effort of making this little game only available to Nexus One owners/testers/users. Oh, and by the way, the browser can tell if you’re using a Nexus One only based on the User Agent Profile which is easily spoofed. Long story short: some tweaking and you can play the holiday memory game yourself.

And as a nice little touch, Google dressed up the robot in some nice little outfits for the game:

Apparently the 2nd of those is “Robo-Ralphie” from A Christmas Story, identified by TechCrunch. It’s nice to see the news take a turn for the merrier and more relaxed as this Google Nexus One Phone stuff has been heavily anchoring everything the past few days.

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Chrome is not “SOL”. There is some weird hex-editor way, for one, but the easier way is to just add –user-agent=”Nexus One” to the end of your shortcut target. This only works in newer Chrome versions, I think, but it certainly worked for me.